Work

Tom Goodchild is the director and founder of Ice Beam Games, he has over 14 years experience in the games industry and has worked at some of the largest video game studios in the UK, including Codemasters, Climax and Free Radical Design. He has been a member of Fleet Collective for the over a year now and has just released the pre-alpha trailer of his latest game Remote. Here’s Tom to tell you more.

“For the last year, I’ve been working at Ice BEAM on my first video game REMOTE. The game was originally conceived as a squad based tactical shooter and the development was started in Unity on a train while on a daily commute to Birmingham. After months of iteration and playtesting the game slowly morphed and changed over into the game we have today; where you play a droid that can hack and take control of other enemy robots. Check out my first trailer on youtube.com.

It’s been a formidable process going working with a large group of developers, each having their own domains and skillsets that they bring to the game, to basically having to do everything myself. I’ve had to learn new programming languages, animate characters, create artificial intelligence logic, edit game trailers and write press releases amongst many other things. Its been such a daunting but also extremely rewarding experience that has made me a much stronger game developer. Its provided much needed perspective (and respect) to the all development disciplines I had previously taken for granted.

The collaborative atmosphere and friendly reception I got from Fleet has been a great support during this painful transition period. Although most come from a different background than video games, this creative drive we all share has helped show me the way.

The game is still in a prototype phase and I think there is another year left of development. I’ve started some tentative steps towards talking to publishers and the press about the game and am still very much learning that side of the business. Hopefully I’ll have some more good news about the game soon, including what platforms it will be on and a firmer release date.

Until then, this is Tom Goodchild, director of Ice BEAM, signing off.”

This feels an urgent task given the profound disruption we are experiencing. Climate change, resource depletion and growing inequality are some of its more visible signs, but the number of people who are trying to earn a living in an environment of increasing unpredictability and insecurity is less visible, increasing in size and range and spanning no end of occupations – including those in arts, culture and creativity.

If you are one of those experiencing this growing ‘precarity’ and are:

striving to help make the cultural ecology where you live and work thrive

seeking to strengthen your capacity to work in ways that will unleash even more of your creativity toward realising your vision and your goals

searching for new ways of capitalising on all your different assets

Then welcome to this community! Join us in finding new ways to work, risk and live so that we can build a more sustainable world for ourselves and for others.

Nesta commissioned Fleet member Studio Sparks and Illustrator Jamie Thoms to produce their creative enterprise workbook which provides insight, information and activities to help young creative professionals launch their own freelance business.

The workbook is broken up into 10 different activities and the style reflects and references notes and doodles, post-it’s and highlighter strokes, in order to make the book feel more tactile and relevant to the target audience.

Dundee is bidding to be the UK City of Culture in 2017, a competition run by the UK government which uses culture and creativity to transform communities. It’s an opportunity to remind ourselves what an astonishing place Dundee is, and what remarkable people live and work here.

We Dundee is a way to show the tremendous imagination and enthusiasm of people from all walks of life across the city, and demonstrate the difference that becoming UK City of Culture could make to us individually and as a city.

Working with Fleet members the city wants to show the competition judges that there’s more to Dundee than they (or we) might think – that it’s a city full of surprises. We want to give them 2,017 reasons to think of us as the best place for the City of Culture to be.

A collaborative approach to finding sustainable solutions for the creative community.

This project is an open dialogue facilitated by Fleet Collective to understand the city’s creative community, its micro ecologies and its complex fragility. In the context of Fleet and using it as a live participant the projects starting point will be to ask how a collective fits into the city’s creative system and what’s its value to it.

How does a collective serve the creative community?

How does a collective formulate its roll within the city’s new cultural vision?

Where can collectives fit, influence and feed into the city’s creative ecology?

This questioning approach can be applied to other creative providers, consumers and facilitators to open the debate about what’s working and what isn’t.

In today’s climate arts organisations need to find new ways of working and find solutions to the changing cultural and economic climate. We hope to expand on our current working practices and find ways to collectively deal with these changes and find solutions that could be applied to the broader community.

Johanna Basford is one of the UK’s top contemporary illustrators, working traditionally in pen and ink. She recently had her first exhibition in Dundee Contemporary Arts and Fleet Collective were commissioned to produce a short video ident for online promotion and also for use in the Cinema within the Arts Centre.

Dundee Contemporary Arts approached Fleet Collective asked them to produce an ident for their cinema. DCA promotes the development and exhibition of contemporary art and culture through providing opportunities for artists to create, and for audiences to engage with an active, varied and high-quality cultural life for the people of Dundee, Scotland and beyond.

The film, which is updated on a regular basis, plays before each showing in their cinema, and has been used for online advertising.

Time and the Conways was written in 1937 and illustrated JW Dunne’s Theory of Time. Alongside the better-known An Inspector Calls, Time and the Conways is part of Priestley’s series of ‘Time Plays’ that toyed with different concepts and theories of time, and is widely regarded as the best of this series.

Original music & visual effects combine to make an intriguing video. Produced by Bonnie Brae Productions.

This short promo captures the excitement of Dundee Contemporary Arts Discovery Film Festival, Scotland’s International Film Festival for Young Audiences.

Discovery Film Festival is now in its 9th year. Based at Dundee Contemporary Arts, and touring to partner venues throughout Scotland, the festival screens films from all over the world which have been specially programmed for young audiences.

Produced by Bonnie Brae Productions this promo short helps promote this exciting event.

Super Special Limited, hand-cast and hand-painted, 5″ high polyresin character by Akinori Oishi and Creo Design for Fleet Collective.

Without doubt favourite thing ever! We worked super hard over 12 months to bring something just a little bit special to NEoN 11. We collaborated with NEoN 10 star Akinori Oishi to develop his take on Dundee’s famous Law into a super limited edition piece of art in a box.

Standing at 5″ high it certainly makes an impact, we hope you agree when you see it that we have created something truly unique.

Working along side many city stakeholders Fleet Collective has been instrumental in the growth and development of the NEoN Digital Arts Festival.

NEoN first came to life through Interactive Tayside in 2009. The festival was designed to promote the area’s (the north east of north, Scotland) digital media activity. A partnership of private, public and academic sectors, the team worked together to deliver ‘NEoN09’, a national and international festival of digital media arts, with a focus on moving image, music and information technologies. The festival offered a host of activities and events including talks, performances, screenings and other special events in some fantastic venues across Tayside.

The 2009 festival was created to inspire studio developers, be they artists or programmers. From the latest production techniques to new business models, the programme of this new festival expanded the notion of art, information communication, media production, games communities and brought the individuals from these sectors together to collaborate.

NEoN has grown to be a to be a 7-day international festival of media arts. It has hosted international exhibitions, performances, interactive installations and roadshow fringe events…including a party in the car park at Greenmarket multi-storey.

Visitors to NEoN digital arts festival 2012 in Dundee had the opportunity to navigate their way around the city in an exciting new way, thanks to augmented reality app “Bombaze” created exclusively for the festival by visual artist Jaygo Bloom.

Have your say on the designing of digital interactions for the city of Dundee!

Download BOMBAZE now from the app store and look out for the unique game-tags spotted around the city to play the game.

Choose at random from animated solutions selected by a panel of industry experts in the field of gameplay and interaction design, but beware! You only get 6 chances, after that you get BOMBAZED!

After making your choice, visit the BOMBAZE game map and see what other players selected, alternatively explore the world of 3D cartoon characters introduced to you through the game and accessible from the BOMBAZE gallery long after the festival events are over.

Remember to visit all the locations and keep an extra look out for 5 SECRET LOCATIONS dotted at RANDOM around the city!

This commission was funded by Creative Scotland in collaboration with Jaygo Bloom, development agency ‘Me and the Giants’, with hand drawn illustrations by Dr Simpo.

After seeing the DCA Cinema Ident work On at Fife approached Fleet to create a video ident that represented the range of offerings their four theatres have.

ON at Fife currently operate four major venues, as well as staging a diverse range of events around Fife. They create brand new work with some of Scotland’s best contemporary theatre companies, artists and performers, as well as providing a crucial role in supporting local arts organisations and groups.

The film now plays before each of their cinema screenings and highlights their diverse programme.

Yolo are a London based online retailer supplying creatives with transfer papers and equipment to allow them to create their own professional printed products.

Established in 2007, Yolo came to Fleet Collective to get a rebrand of it’s identity and website to make it more friendlier and bring it inline with it’s creative customers ambitions. Yolo wanted to inspire their customers and move away from just exhibiting the products for sale and bring the focus more onto what could be achieved with the product.

We helped Yolo to re-brand and develop a new identity that would be carried across all it’s print and online media as well as creating more streamlined and pictorial instruction sheets to aim customers with applying the products.